Forget the conditional: everyone should seriously examine the question of whether they are a jerk from time to time.
It's a surprisingly subtle thing, to be a jerk. No matter how good you are, everyone is not going to like you. No matter how bad you are, someone is going to like you anyway. This is a truth that politicians are intimately familiar with, since their careers depend on maintaining awareness of how they are perceived by large groups of people. This is also well understood in Silicon Valley, where some of the most successful entrepreneurs are clearly and openly jerks - but who are revered anyway.
Complicating matters is that the standards of jerkiness change. It used to be that cussing made you a jerk. No longer true. There is a strong cadre of egoists constantly looking to eliminate the association between "selfishness" and "jerkiness" - with surprisingly effective results.
Last but not least, the public likes to witness the degradation of others. Most reality TV and daytime talk is based on this premise. It makes us feel superior, a kind of milder version of the mob mentality. (And they get what they want because people are willing to have almost anything done to them in exchange for attention, including being demeaned.)
Most YouTubers who make original content, like Vi Hart, are not doing it for attention. They aren't willing to participate in pop culture sado-masochism. What Google has unwittingly done is force this unhealthy dynamic on content creators.
The solution, of course, is to give content creators more control over their comments, over the community of people that consume their work. That is entirely possible from a technical point of view and I think would address this problem to everyone's satisfaction.
Yes, everyone should, but the real question is what the answer to question of whether you're being a jerk should be.
If you're being a jerk too much, maybe you ought to re-evaluate your personality, and make a bigger effort to empathize with and respect your fellow man. I don't think much of anyone here disputes that.
But I would also say that never being a jerk is just as big of a problem. If nobody has ever thought that you were being a jerk, maybe you need to learn to respect yourself and stand up for yourself more often, or else people will tend to not take you seriously or respect your opinions.
It's a surprisingly subtle thing, to be a jerk. No matter how good you are, everyone is not going to like you. No matter how bad you are, someone is going to like you anyway. This is a truth that politicians are intimately familiar with, since their careers depend on maintaining awareness of how they are perceived by large groups of people. This is also well understood in Silicon Valley, where some of the most successful entrepreneurs are clearly and openly jerks - but who are revered anyway.
Complicating matters is that the standards of jerkiness change. It used to be that cussing made you a jerk. No longer true. There is a strong cadre of egoists constantly looking to eliminate the association between "selfishness" and "jerkiness" - with surprisingly effective results.
Last but not least, the public likes to witness the degradation of others. Most reality TV and daytime talk is based on this premise. It makes us feel superior, a kind of milder version of the mob mentality. (And they get what they want because people are willing to have almost anything done to them in exchange for attention, including being demeaned.)
Most YouTubers who make original content, like Vi Hart, are not doing it for attention. They aren't willing to participate in pop culture sado-masochism. What Google has unwittingly done is force this unhealthy dynamic on content creators.
The solution, of course, is to give content creators more control over their comments, over the community of people that consume their work. That is entirely possible from a technical point of view and I think would address this problem to everyone's satisfaction.